PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

186Pacific Worldunder the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1260–1367). Uigur people were grantedthe status of second rank in the empire’s ethnic hierarchy and playedsignificant roles in politics, economics, culture, and religion as the leadersof “people of colored eyes.”For example, the Mongols, who did not have a writing system, firstborrowed Uigur scripts to develop Mongolian scripts. Most Uigur civilianofficers working in the Mongolian capital city Dadu (modern Beijing) asofficers of the “people of colored eyes” were Buddhists. They usedblockprinting, the most advanced printing technology of the time, topublish great numbers of Buddhist texts and sent them to the people livingin their homeland in the Turfan area. Many printed texts discovered in EastTurkistan were texts published during the Yuan Dynasty, and most of theprinted materials are Buddhist texts. They are printed not only in Uigur butinclude texts in Sanskrit and Xixia language. It is known that the peoplewho printed and bound these texts were Chinese because the folio numbersare in Chinese characters. Uigur Buddhism was the last of the Buddhistcultures that flourished in East Turkistan and came to the end in themid-fourteenth century together with the destruction of the Yuan Empire.III. RELIGIOUS BACKGROUNDThe religious life of the Uigur people during the time that they were anomadic tribe on the Mongolian steppes might fall into the category ofshamanism or animism. As mentioned above, when they learned aboutManichaeism from the Sogdians while fighting for China during theAnshi revolt, aristocratic Uigurs adopted Manichaeism and made ittheir state religion.After they migrated into the oasis cities on the Silk Route in the latterhalf of the ninth century, some remained Manichaeans. Some aristocraticUigurs converted to Christianity when they encountered Nestorian missionaries.However, the majority of Uigurs, including common people,became Buddhists while living in this strongly Buddhist environment.This is known from the following facts: (1) many religious texts discoveredin the area are Buddhist texts; (2) the names of donors on religiousdocuments have Buddhist names; (3) they frequently used words borrowedfrom Sanskrit; and (4) business transactions, such as borrowinggrain or selling bondsmen, customarily required a witness, and in manycases monks from Buddhist monasteries performed this function.Uigurs express the name of the Buddha as bur-xan, combining theword “buîet,” the middle archaic pronunciation of the Chinese characterfo, with the Altaic-language honorific ending -xan (-qan [-khan in Mongolian]).It seems that they thought that this was not enough, because theyadded the word tängri (heaven) before burxan and calleed the Buddha